Generalist Repository Pilot Outcomes, Comparison Chart Now Available

The National Institutes of Health’s Office of Data Science Strategy (ODSS) recently completed the NIH Figshare Instance, a one-year pilot project, as part of an ongoing strategy to explore the roles and uses of generalist repositories in our data repository landscape. Data in the NIH Figshare Instance archive will continue to remain publicly accessible and editable, and outcomes of the project are now available.

The ODSS also co-hosted a community workshop with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in February 2020 on the “Role of Generalist Repositories to Enhance Data Discoverability and Reuse.” The workshop co-chairs and participating generalist repositories recently published a generalist repository comparison chart as one of the outcomes of this event.

NIH encourages researchers to use generalist and institutional repositories that align with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s desirable characteristics and that make their data more findable and accessible when a domain-specific data repository is not available. The recently published comparison chart is intended to help researchers select the best generalist repository for their data sharing needs.
 

To learn more about data repositories, visit the biomedical data repositories and knowledgebases page. To see NIH-supported, domain-specific repositories, visit the data sharing resources page hosted by the NLM.